BSD use in embedded systems is probably as wide spread as any other OS, it just has virtually no advertising.. quite typically it gets customized by a company and maintained internally.

I'm not sure what exactly you're asking, or how you propose to modify FreeBSD, but choosing BSD as the basis for a project/product is no doubt a solid choice.. assuming you have people willing to put in the time and effort.

I don't know about turning FreeBSD into a RTOS, or what RT features you're interested in, there exists a mailing list.. but it appears to be low volume, someone more experienced with FreeBSD might be able to answer.

There is a modified commercial OpenBSD product that I've read about called RTMX but I don't know much about it either.

BSD use in embedded systems is probably as wide spread as any other OS, it just has virtually no advertising.. quite typically it gets customized by a company and maintained internally.

I'm not sure what exactly you're asking, or how you propose to modify FreeBSD, but choosing BSD as the basis for a project/product is no doubt a solid choice.. assuming you have people willing to put in the time and effort.

I guess it all sounds cryptic unless I state what i am trying to do. The goal of the RTOS BSD would be to make a time-triggered Ethernet routing system that also hosts specific applications with guaranteed time and space resources -- preferably configurable to a resolution of a least 100 usec. Ideal would be if it even hosted e.g. Java apps, or even better a virtual machine, but that may be ambitious.

This product will be certified against rigorous industry standards that cannot be met without a full set of requirements (and well documented testing against them) for the functionality in use.

So I need two things: Requirements that cover the full set of BSD features; and a deterministic FreeBSD scheduler.

We've made requirements in this kind of environment before, so if I have to I will make them myself. It just would be nice if there are some out there to even just rent, so to speak.

The reason I chose FreeBSD is the critical code feature that allows apps to run without being interrupted from a given core. We've used this very successfully to achieve Ethernet scheduling in software that would normally require hardware while running Windows in multiple virtualbox sessions (all on the same Xeon-based machine).